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Goodbye, ever-spreading London. Hello, a more compact city. A bold, new approach to planning London’s future is a game-changer that will radically alter where growth is focused, how we’ll get around and even how streets will feel. Randy Richmond reports.

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Meet London’s future.

A rapid transit system with mini-downtown transit villages, reborn suburban shopping areas, streets that determine how a neighbourhood grows and people move, a food network linking the region to the city and every neighbourhood within — those are just some of the elements in a plan shown for the first time to the public and city council Thursday.

Officially the city’s official plan, the 411-page glossy document guides the development, growth and revitalization of a city facing entrenched problems, from a lack of identity to trouble hanging onto jobs and young workers.

“We are city building by creating a mosaic of great places,” planning director John Fleming said.

Everything about the plan is different, from its size — half the width of the previous and dry official plan — to the glossy photographs it contains, to the way it reads.

City planners have tossed aside traditional ways of organizing the city and come up with some radical and possibly unique methods. Instead of land uses, they talk about places.

Instead of viewing streets with separate functions for cars, people and buildings, they link the three to see how they should interact.

What else is different?

Much of the direction came not from professional engineers, planners and other bureaucrats, but from about 10,000 Londoners who took part in the two-year ReThink London exercise.

“The content is the content we heard from Londoners. We wrote it, but it was very much informed by the past two years,” said Gregg Barrett, manager of city planning.

The plan establishes early on why it’s needed, besides the fact the last official plan was created in 1989 and has basically run out.

“We’re out in the middle of a cornfield here, we’re off the beaten track from the GTA and we have to make sure that the city we continue to build is one that is very attractive for talent, very attractive for investment,” Fleming said.

A new way of thinking is outlined under “the big ideas” — 12 points that explain how things should change.

The big ideas include:

The way the city is built is the key to attracting labour, industry and investment. Jobs aren’t going to come here just because

Building inward and upward — in sharp contrast to London’s tradition of sprawling outward — will attract more people, especially millennials born between 1980 and 2000, and save money

Transportation – such as the way streets are designed, and the creation of a rapid transit system – forms the foundation for the revitalized city

The city is a collection of interconnected places, each with a clear purpose and vision that can determine what gets built where, and how

Another big idea: The London Plan establishes a city structure that provides a bird’s-eye view of growth for the next 20 years and the bones that must be protected and considered every step of the way.

The bones of the structure include the river system, the natural heritage corridor, the streets, the proposed transit corridors and new villages, the neighbourhoods, the main streets of former villages and the industrial area.

After exploring the big picture, the plan gets into the nitty-gritty.

First, a long but reader-friendly outline of the 17 city building policies that will create a new London.

Each policy section answers the same questions: What is the policy? Why is it important to our future?

What are we trying to achieve? How are we going to achieve this?

Then, the plan outlines the places of London, another sign of the different way city staff have thought about the blueprint.

“The London Plan takes a different approach by planning for areas with an emphasis on the type of place we are to create and the corresponding experiences one might have in such places,” the plan reads.

By figuring out the uses, intensity and form of development in each place, the city can become the mosaic of unique places with distinct identities, the plan states.

Some of the plan’s key elements mirror those of a series called What’s London, launched by The Free Press in 2011 and still going on in 2012 when ReThink London was launched.

That series explored the need for a change in the city, a new identity, in order to succeed.

Fleming credits The Free Press for starting a conversation, but he and city staff have taken that conversation much deeper and further.

“It’s very much telling a story,” Fleming said of The London Plan, noting the planning tools — “all the things no one wants to read” — are at the end.

The London Plan is so glossy, Fleming jokes, that you could compare it to the magazine Vanity Fair.

“That’s unrealistic,” he said, “but we’ve made it pretty sexy, not just in terms of the look, but what we’ve tried to do is structure it in a way people can digest.”

In urban areas, building bases will encourage human interaction through windows with transparent glass and awnings and lights. Upper floors should be recessed from streets to allow sunlight and reduce wind tunnels

“Exceptionally designed, high-density mixed-use urban neighbourhoods connected by rapid transit to the downtown and each other”

Rapid transit corridors could also contain mixed-use communities, but not in quieter residential areas

SHOPPING AREAS

Refers to retail centres dotted throughout the city that are in some cases struggling

Plan helps centres offer new services and become more pedestrian-friendly, more oriented to transit system

MAIN STREETS

Refers to Hyde Park, Lambeth, Hamilton Rd., Wortley Village, Byron

Plan offers ways to protect and revitalize them

NEIGHBOURHOODS

A little more mixed use, protection of natural areas, and live-work places will give them a boost

Depending on size of roads, intersections will be places where retail, offices allowed

INDUSTRIAL PLACES

Offer companies more variety of lots, with access to different services

Develop industrial centres of excellence

Improve the aesthetic quality of the city’s Hwy. 401/402 corridors

Incorporate green technology and promote it to green industry

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Councillor Paul Van Meerbergen looks over The London Plan during city council meeting. (DEREK RUTTAN, The London Free Press)

FIRST IMPRESSIONS:

"This is the blueprint. I love it, it looks good in terms of the overall, but . . . a whole lot of people are going to be asking 'what are you doing with my land?' "

Mayor Joe Fontana

"We know this is a draft plan, but it certainly is bold and it's visionary and exciting. We need to recognize the countless hours that staff have poured into this process to date (and) the 10,000 Londoners that participated to date."

Coun. Matt Brown

"It was absolutely a citywide process and a citywide initiative. Thousands of Londoners came to the table to speak about . . . the future of our city."

John Fleming, city hall planning director

"Whatever is adopted here will likely go to the OMB (Ontario Municipal Board, which adjudicates land-use decisions provincewide), there's no question in my mind. And the public needs to follow it to the end . . . for as long as it takes until the plan is adopted."

Coun. Joni Baechler

"It's great. It's just great to see such a visionary and pragmatic (document) come from our civic leaders. I hope it actually gets put into use."

Nicholas Deibler

"I believe that it's very forward-thinking. The fact the citizenry was engaged is a huge positive. For me, one of the more attractive things was (the emphasis on) urban density."